CERN to Use Comic Sans in All Communications

Posted on April 1, 2014

CERN announced today that all of CERN's official communication channels are switching to exclusive use of the font Comic Sans. The casual script typeface was released by Microsoft in 1994. The changes will take effect today, April 1, 2014

CERN Head of Communications James Gillies says in the announcement, "We thought the most effective way to communicate our research into the fundamental structure of matter at the very boundaries of technology was by changing the font."

Gillies says that Comic Sans sends the following message: "This is a serious laboratory, with a serious research agenda."

Gillies also says, "And it makes the letters look all round and squishy."

Here is the short official announcement from former ATLAS spokesperson Fabiola Gianotti.

Comic Sans was used by Fabiola Gianotti for one of two presentations announcing the discovery of a new particle consistent with the Higgs boson in 2012. CERN scientists have linked the viral success of Gianotti's presentation to the Comic Sans font and so now they want everything to be in this font. The scientists say they deconstructed Gianotti's presentation at the very tiniest level to study its fundamental structure. They then came up with a sophisticated statistical model to separate the font from the background content.

Presentation analyst May Dupp says, "According to our calculations, 80% of the success of the presentation came not from the discovery of a fundamental particle that explains the Brout-Englert-Higgs mechanism for how particles get mass, but from the choice of font. It's a logical step – and plain common sense – to apply this technique to all of CERN's communications."

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